There were many hours when I never quite know how I'd gotten there or why I stayed.

You be greater than your feelings. I don't demand this of you - life does. Otherwise you'll be washed away by feelings. You'll be washed out to sea and never seen again.

Each book starts from ashes really. I don't feel that I have this to say or that to say or this story to tell or that story to tell, but I want to be occupied with the writing process while I'm living.

He had learned the worst lesson that life can teach - that it makes no sense.

You put too much stock in human intelligence, it doesn't annihilate human nature.

Nothing has a more sinister effect on art than the artist's desire to prove that he's good. The terrible temptation of idealism! You must achieve mastery over your idealism, over your virtue as well as over your vice, aesthetic mastery over everything that drives you to write in the first place - your outrage, your politics, your grief, your love!

If you read a novel in more than two weeks, you don't read the novel really.